DTLS 1.3 has quite a few cool features/upgrades. Wrote some down so you can see the cool stuff coming your way. Also a few notes on stuff that was surprising or frustrating while building it.
If you get a chance to try it out would love to hear your thoughts! Should be available soon in pion/dtls@v4 :)
I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents.
I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?
I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.
I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused peeps like to produce.
Here is another thing I find frustrating, but I don't know the right way to express it. A lot of this AI tooling/coding seems self-indulgent? 'I built a better software factory!'. The tools are very powerful, but I don't see the results yet. The frustration outweighs results.
I am underwater dealing with it. I am getting outlandish PRs against Pion. So I spend my time triaging and feel burned out. The 'AI future' I was expecting would be people swooping in and clearing up the backlog in high quality ways.
Instead I get people trying to add new APIs when it can already be done with existing APIs and then arguing about it with me.
Please don't forget you are under no obligation to triage all the awful things.
You are well within your rights to require submitters reach a certain standard before you will review their request.
Your time is finite and precious. Your project benefits from your enthusiasm and knowledge. It does not benefit from you acting as human reviewer of a tsunami of low quality content.
You are allowed to be ruthlessly protective of your time to the benefit of your project.
This begs an importent question: how? How do you filter without putting up barriers that high quality contributors will not want to climb?
I ask both as a maintainer who has been overwhelmed and as someone who declines to participate in communities where the bar is set too high for casual drive-by contributions.
Make it a rule that any PR that changes over ... 100 LoC? 150? <some number you're comfortable with> needs to be broken down into smaller, more atomic ones.
If that can't be done, e.g. because it's a very large refactor that can only be published as a unit, get them to walk you through each design and architectural choice.
I don't think a high quality contributor will take issue with that.
Because the factories of factories is mostly bullshit. OpenAI blogged about how it was complicated for them to build a project using AI alone and the specs in the repo, how easy it was for models to get lost, not do what was expected of them and the burden it was on the team.
I don't think we will never get there but we're definitely not there yet. Models still require a lot of handholding to get things done.
> I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.
I suspect there's some survivorship bias at play here. You don't hear what the tradesmen who shied away from using powertools thought because they ceased to find work as tradesmen.
In the same way, future software makers will all be raving about their favorite LLM.
He also made the most beautiful hand crafted woodwork I’ve seen.
I dunno, I feel my comparison is more apt. AI tries to anything & everything. A powered drill just drills, and saves your arm/wrist from a manual drill.
A better analogy for an individual might be a cnc lathe. You can make anything you want perfectly but if you enjoyed wood turning then you may not get the same satisfaction from the process of running a cnc.
I think there’s still value in hand made furniture with little to no power tool involvement. There’s certainly value in creating furniture yourself in this way.
It doesn’t give answer the question about the people who loved that job , the many old school carpenters who had to adapt or give up.
I wonder if hand coding will become mostly a hobby and maybe a niche market. I’m not saying I like it, that’s tbd, but I wonder about it.
This is fantastic! I have wanted something like this for years.
When people are learning WebRTC they are really confused by the Offer/Answer. You have this big blob of text and no idea what it actually does. You look up values one-by-one and forget as you go. its annoying
Excited that the next generation learning WebRTC (for VoiceAI) has better tools.
Fantastic work on this. This idea has so much promise, I hope this is the project that makes it take off.
Self-hosting is pretty these days with docker. Exposing it to the internet is the annoying part. I do Jellyfin via netbird, but that means I don't really share it with my friends. I hope something like this getting baked into self-hosting flows is killer.
My other pet peeve is that people use 'Cloud Services' for File transfer. Sometimes when they are in the same LAN!
Nice work again and I hope it catches on/people understand how great this really is :)
Thank you -- and if you're the Sean who wrote Pion, this is built on your work, so that means a lot. :)
The friends case is exactly the gap I kept running into. A mesh VPN is fine for my own devices and hopeless the moment someone else needs in, because now they're installing a client and making an account to look at one thing. Here they get a link.
Baking it into self-hosting flows is the right instinct and I'd love help figuring out where it fits. There's already an OctoPrint plugin; Jellyfin seems like the obvious next one.
Accepting 'Big Changes' from people is VERY frustrating. These thoughts run through my head.
* Idea is usually good! Even if I don't understand it could help lots of others users.
* The contributor is very focused on just getting their feature in. The impact on the larger project isn't as much a concern.
* New contributors often don't have the grit to see it out. They will disappear before things are done. So I am left picking up the pieces (which is harder then doing it all myself)
----
What I try and remember is that their happiness/experience matters more then any code. I try to help the contributor learn/grow as much as possible and even see some career benefits out of it. Pion will cease to matter eventually, so I hope to help as many programmers with it as possible.
I sent a letter to the Soviet Union asking if they were ok with me using the name, never heard back!
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